1. Technical Field
The inventive arrangements relate generally to methods and apparatus providing advanced operating features for programs recorded on disc media, for example recordable digital video discs, hard drives and magneto optical discs.
2. Description of the Related Art
While trick modes enable a user to view recorded video at different speeds, the video is not permanently altered by the process. If the video is displayed at a later time, then the user must initiate another trick mode to view the video at a different speed. Significantly, however, many users may wish to permanently change the playback speed of a particular portion of video by modifying the video once the video has been recorded onto a disc. Such a process can permit speed variations during playback without the user invoking a trick mode command. Unfortunately, several significant obstacles exist that make editing recorded video in such a fashion impracticable. Specifically, the space occupied by the original video is not large enough to store the pictures that must be repeated in order to produce slow motion playback. In addition to spatial limitations, repeating pictures on the disc can interfere with the conventional picture structure of the video, which can degrade the display quality of the video during playback.
Modifying recorded video to produce fast-forward playback, however, is not affected by the spatial limitations that impede slow-motion editing. This is because fast-forward editing merely deletes pictures from the recorded video. Nevertheless, creating fast-forward video, similar to slow-motion modification, also negatively impacts the conventional picture to structure of the video. Thus, what is needed is a device that can change the playback speed of video recorded under a field structure format yet can overcome the spatial and structural limitations associated with such recorded video.